Sunday, April 22, 2012

Palestinians burn Israel's
national flag during a rally in front of the Red Cross headquarters in
Gaza City marking Palestinian Prisoners Day April 17, 2012. (Reuters /
Suhaib Salem)

The majority of the 4,699 Palestinians being currently held in
Israeli prisons refused their meals on Prisoners’ Day, while 1,200 of
them promise to hunger strike indefinitely to protest against unfair
conditions.

­The other 2,300 have refused to eat any food for the whole of Tuesday.

Later
on Tuesday Israel is to release Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan, 33,
who attracted worldwide media attention after spending 66 days on hunger
strike – the longest in Palestinian history.
In Palestinian
authority practically every person has a relative or acquaintance that
has spent or is spending time in Israeli prison. Palestinians consider
those jailed as freedom fighters, whichever setup they belong to, be it
Hamas, Islamic Jihad or any other Palestinian organization.

Israel
has 17 detention facilities across the country and the West Bank.
According to Israeli data, 3,864 of the total number of prisoners are
from the occupied West Bank, 475 are from Gaza and 360 are Arab Israelis
or from Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem.

The Palestinian data says that 534 prisoners – more than one in 10 – are serving a life sentence.
Israeli rights group B'Tselem also gives figure of 203 jailed Palestinian minors, 31 of whom are under 16 years old.

Israeli
also use an “administrative detention” legislative that dates back to
British protectorate of the region. This procedure allows Israel to
detain suspects indefinitely without charges being brought against them,
simply by repeating the implied maximum six-month periods of detention
time after time.

At the moment there are 319 persons under “administrative detention” in Israel.

Last
year the number of Palestinians in Israeli jails considerably reduced
after the release of 1,027 prisoners in exchange for captive Israeli
soldier Gilad Shalit, a swap deal between Palestine’s Hamas and official
Tel-Aviv after years of negotiations.

All in all, since 1967,
when Israel occupied East Jerusalem as a result of Six-Day War, the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip, some 700,000 Palestinians have seen the
daylight from behind the bars of Israeli prisons. This is equivalent to
20 per cent of the total population of the Palestinian Authority.

Break the Chains.info

is a news and discussion forum for supporters of political prisoners, prisoners of war, politicized social prisoners, and victims of police and state intimidation.

This blog is organized and updated autonomously of the disbanded Break the Chains Prisoner Support Network formerly based in Eugene, Oregon. While this online project shares several of the same concerns as the old Break the Chains collective, no formal organization exists behind the current web presence.

"I will never surrender my pride and dignity nor allow the system to 'cut my tongue' and I will always, without fear, speak out against these war crimes and crimes against humanity, no matter if I spend the rest of my life in a prison cage, and draw my last breath of air laying down in this steel bed surrounded by razor-wire fences and cages, and its prison policies that are designed to destroy one's humanity…."